No convergence for open mobile platforms; devs go own way

At the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, Google and Nokia denied rumors that …

The recent emergence of a number of open source mobile platforms has raised some questions about the potential for convergence. These platforms all have much to offer, but the fragmentation will create challenges for third-party software developers. Some industry observers have suggested that there could be advantages in bringing these platforms together, but technical and philosophical differences make unity an unlikely scenario.

During the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, Nokia hosted a breakfast discussion panel about the impact of open source on the mobile industry. One of the panelists, Forum Nokia vice president Tom Libretto, denied rumors that Symbian will merge with Android and said that such claims are pure speculation.

Nokia revealed earlier this year that it is acquiring Symbian and intends to open source the platform and distribute it under the Eclipse Public License through a non-profit foundation. This plan is intended to help Nokia build an open ecosystem around the Symbian platform so that it can remain competitive as Android and LiMo challenge its dominance.

After Nokia announced its plans for Symbian in June, analyst firm J. Gold Associates issued a research note claiming that Open handset Alliance would team up with the newly-formed Symbian Foundation to provide a single, unified platform based on Google's Linux-based Android operating system and Symbian. "We expect that within the next three-six months, Symbian and Android will combine to provide a single open source OS," J. Gold said, according to InformationWeek. "A combination of the Android and Symbian efforts would be good for the industry, good for Google and good for Symbian."

These claims don't really hold up to scrutiny. The two platforms are extremely different, and it is difficult to imagine any reasonable path for combining them. Android's unique Java-based programming model is nothing like Symbian's native C++ development architecture. Merging the two platforms would require a radical feat of reengineering that would likely leave very little of either original platform intact. It's hard to see any way that anyone would derive value from this move.

Despite the optimism of the analysts, bringing together different software platforms is not like mixing a drink. The Symbian Foundation will have a hard enough time just trying to combine the existing derivative technologies built on its platform, some of which have been offered for inclusion by its own foundation members.

It's also worth noting that Nokia is still at the earliest stages of opening Symbian and predicts that it could take as long as two years for the source code to be fully opened. The source won't even be available to Symbian Foundation members under royalty-free licenses until early next year. Google has already suffered many delays in its aggressive push to get an Android-based handset to the market as soon as possible. I'm not sure how J. Gold Associates thinks that Google even has time to consider drastic platform changes.

For all of those reasons, I was completely unsurprised when Libretto said that Nokia presently has no plans to merge Symbian with Android or any other Linux-based platform. During a different LinuxWorld presentation, Google declared that it has no plans to join the work on the LiMo mobile platform. Google's middleware stack is somewhat insular and is largely built around a custom Java runtime called Dalvik. LiMo, on the other hand, has a GTK-based stack that is much more closely aligned with conventional desktop Linux technologies. Aside from their mutual use of the Linux kernel, the two platforms have little in common.

There are also significant procedural and ideological differences between Google's Open Handset Alliance and the LiMo Foundation. Google is developing Android from the top down with input from its partners in the Alliance. The process is not particularly inclusive or transparent, and vendors will not be allowed to customize the software in ways that fragment the platform. LiMo will offer a set of cohesive APIs and standard components, but will not police its members or require them to conform to any standards.

The platforms will probably never converge, but some possibilities still remain open for unified application development. Nokia recently acquired Trolltech, the company behind the highly portable Qt development toolkit. It's very likely that Qt—which already has support for Windows Mobile and Linux—will gain support for Symbian in the future as well. It is currently unclear whether Android's unique Java-oriented approach is conducive to a Qt port, but that route certainly could be feasible for LiMo. If Qt continues to appear on new mobile platforms, then developers could have a very strong option for creating mobile applications that can work across multiple targets. Qt is currently supported on Maemo and OpenMoko.

Although the growing number of incompatible targets will make the open source mobile landscape difficult for third-party developers to navigate, there are also a lot of advantages to diversity. This sort of fragmentation has been the reality of the Linux desktop, however, and it hasn't entirely proven to be a strength there; commercial software companies have used it as a justification for not porting their applications to Linux. It can also accentuate one of the worst aspects of cellphone interfaces: the fact that usage habits learned on one phone model often don't apply to the next one you purchase.

If any of these platforms fail or don't live up to consumer expectations, then the rest will still have an opportunity to thrive. The companies and organizations behind these platforms should be able to learn from the mistakes of the others and drive innovation through competition.

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